The character 日 (rì): sun

A large golden yellow sun rises from behind a low line of hills, its rays spread across an orange and pink sky strewn with clouds, and a plain cream band fills the bottom of the picture. At the centre of the disc, the character 日 in very dark brown: an upright rectangle, taller than it is wide, drawn as a thick empty frame and cut across the middle by a single bar.

Pronunciation: rì
Strokes: 4
Level: HSK 2
Radical: 日

What it means

sun; day; date, day of the month

Where its shape comes from

The sun, with a mark in the middle of it. On the oldest inscriptions the outline is round and the inner mark is often no more than a dot; the rectangle we write today is a regularisation, as with every circle in the script. What that mark represents has never been settled: Xu Shen contents himself with describing the graph as an enclosure and a stroke.

Source: Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi (121 CE); the Chinese University of Hong Kong character database.

A way to remember it

The rectangle of 口, with a bar laid straight across the middle of it. That bar, and nothing else, is the whole difference between the mouth and the sun. Two characters one stroke apart, and both of them turn up on almost every page of Chinese you will ever read.

This is a memory aid, not the origin of the character.

Words it appears in

生日 shēng rì · HSK 2 birthday; CL:個|个[ge4]
节日 jié rì · HSK 3 holiday; festival; CL:個|个[ge4]
日记 rì jì · HSK 4 diary; CL:則|则[ze2],本[ben3],篇[pian1]
日期 rì qī · HSK 5 date; CL:個|个[ge4]
日子 rì zi · HSK 5 day; a (calendar) date; days of one's life
日常 rì cháng · HSK 5 day-to-day; daily; everyday

Writing it

See the stroke order of 日, animated stroke by stroke.